Summary
Danish King Frederik has redesigned the royal coat of arms to prominently feature symbols of Greenland and the Faroe Islands, replacing the historical three crowns, in an apparent rebuke to Donald Trump’s renewed interest in buying Greenland.
The change underscores Denmark’s commitment to maintaining its territorial integrity.
Greenland’s Prime Minister Múte Egede firmly rejected Trump’s suggestion, declaring, “Greenland is ours.”
This marks the fourth revision of Denmark’s coat of arms since 1819 and highlights Greenland’s century-long political and cultural ties to Denmark despite U.S. military presence on the island.
Honestly, buying Greenland is the most feasible of Trump’s territorial expansion proposals. There aren’t that many Greenlanders. They number 50,000 or so, and they all have Danish and EU citizenship.
The US could cut a check for $10 million USD to every man, woman, and child in Greenland, and the cost would come to about $500 billion. That’s a song for a territory that large and of such long-term significance.
And you wouldn’t be actually taking anyone’s land. Existing land ownership would be respected. All that would change is that Greeland would be part of the US, not Denmark. And if any Greenland citizens don’t want to live in the US, they can retire to Denmark and live well off the $20 million USD a couple of two would get.
The small population of Greenland makes otherwise impractical strategies like this possible. There’s so few Greenlanders that we could just cut them each enormous checks in order to buy them all out.